Reunion

REUNION

Other books by Fleda Brown: The Women Who Loved Elvis All Their Lives Breathing In, Breathing Out The Devil’s Child* The Earliest House* Do Not Peel the Birches* Fishing With Blood* Critical Essays on D. H. Lawrence* *as Fleda Brown Jackson

Fleda Brown

REUNION

The University of Wisconsin Press

The University of Wisconsin Press 1930 Monroe Street Madison, Wisconsin 53711 www.wisc.edu/wisconsinpress/ 3 Henrietta Street London WC2E 8LU, England Copyright © 2007 The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System All rights reserved 5

4

3

2

1

Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Jackson, Fleda Brown, 1944– Reunion / Fleda Brown. p. cm. — (The Felix Pollak prize in poetry) ISBN 0-299-22180-6 (alk. paper) ISBN 0-299-22184-9 (pbk. : alk. paper) I. Title. PS3560.A21534R48<3M>2007 811'.54—dc22<3M>2006031482

for my sister Melinda

Surely you never have dreamed the incredible depths were prologue and epilogue merely To the surface play in the sun, the instant of life, what is called life? I fancy That silence is the thing, this noise a found word for it. . . . Robinson Jeffers, “The Treasure”

The man pulling radishes pointed the way with a radish. Issa

Contents Acknowledgments

xi

I Canada Anemone I Return to Fayetteville after Twenty Years What It Was Like Biology Lesson Fayetteville Junior High Elegy for Donna The Explanation Knot Tying Lessons: The Slip Knot Makeup Regimen Delaware The Death of Cleone

3 4 5 6 7 8 9 11 12 13 16

II Trillium If Names Started Coming Loose Small Boys Fishing under the Bridge Light Red Paint Poverty of Spirit Ode to the Buffman Brothers Knot Tying Lessons: The Clove Hitch

19 20 22 24 25 26 27 28 ix

Flying Ants For My Daughter’s Fortieth Birthday The Moon Is Moving Away No Heron Knot Tying Lessons: The Perfection Knot

29 30 32 33 34

III Bladder Campion Perspective Map Mouse Birthday Twelfth Wedding Anniversary Poem Wild Lily of the Valley Rubbing Feet Reading Poetry at the Horse Meadow Senior Center Elegy for a Woman Killed on New London Road by a Flying Deer The Student The Girl Thit Got Struck with Lightning Indian River Inlet, I For Bill, Injured in Final Dress Rehearsal Lady’s Slipper Oppressions Through Security Walker Indian River Inlet, II

37 38 39 40 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 55 56 57

IV Jack in the Pulpit Knife On a Marble Relief Sculpture of an Unknown Boy, 1865 Bridal Veil Falls

x

61 62 68 69

Acknowledgments Thanks to the following periodicals in which these poems first appeared, sometimes in different versions: Arts and Letters, “Light,” “Small Boys Fishing Under the Bridge,” “Knife” Cortland Review, “Twelfth Wedding Anniversary Poem,” “Elegy for a Woman Killed by a Deer on New London Road” Florida Review, “Elegy for Donna” Georgia Review, “Knot Tying Lessons: The Perfection Knot,” “Knot Tying Lessons: The Slip Knot,” “Knot Tying Lessons: The Clove Hitch” Image, “Ode to the Buffman Brothers,” “Poverty of Spirit” Kenyon Review, “No Heron” Lake Effect, “The Explanation” Midwest Quarterly, “Red Paint” Paterson Review, “Mouse” Poet Lore, “The Death of Cleone,” “What It Was Like” Poetry, “Jack in the Pulpit,” “Bladder Campion,” “Canada Anemone” Prairie Schooner, “Delaware” Runes, “I Return to Fayetteville after Twenty Years”

xi

Snakebird: Thirty Years of Anhinga Poets, “Reading Poetry at the Horse Meadow Senior Center” Southern Poetry Review, “Indian River Inlet, II,” “Trillium” Southern Review, “Indian River Inlet, I,” “Through Security,” “Makeup Regimen” Tampa Review, “Flying Ants” West Branch, “If Names Started Coming Loose” This book would be much the worse without the fiercely accurate eye of Dabney Stuart, accompanied by his endless generosity and friendship through the process of preparing the manuscript—and by the example of his own poems. I wish also especially to thank Sydney Lea, especially for his friendship and encouragement, and for his own poems, which have been models for me for years. I am grateful to the University of Delaware for a sabbatical leave that enabled me to write many of the poems in this book, and to the English Department writing faculty—Jeanne Murray Walker, Cruce Stark, Bernie Kaplan, and Gibbons Ruark—for their twenty - seven years of colleagueship and support. I also want to thank Anne Colwell for her help with “Knife,” and to mention my valuable association with many other Delaware poets in writing retreats, workshops, and festivals over the last few years. Their energy and devotion to the craft have helped me more than they know. And Laura Scanlan, Director of Delaware Division of the Arts, has been helpful to me in myriad ways. Finally, I am thankful for my large family, whose love and energy keep me going. And particularly, as always, I am grateful to my husband, Jerry, for his love and friendship, and for his willing reading of everything, in every draft.

xii

I

Canada Anemone I count nineteen white blossoms which would not be visible except for their wiry stems that catapult them above the grass like the last white pop of fireworks, a toothed blast of leaf below. It’s the Fourth of July on the bank of Hinkson Creek fifty years ago, the powderbitterness, the red combustion, my life, since anemos means wind, means change, no matter that I’ve been held all along in this thin twenty miles of atmosphere. The wind’s disturbed the leaves, rolled the waves, convincing enough. Each star of a bloom is driven upward almost against its small nature. All it can do is hang on and die. Still, it did want to go as high as possible, for some reason, to sway up there like an art object.

3

I Return to Fayetteville after Twenty Years The Methodist church still chimes its electric hymns. I’m still in junior high study hall, desk bolted to the floor. I’ve grown so tall, though, that I hover over myself, where I’m scratching a crude house on the desktop with a straightened paper clip. It’s a long way down to the house, the one on Whitham Street, with the creek and the crazy ironing lady and the field and the chloroformed kittens and the crying. Or the one on Maxwell Drive with the crawl space and the mother cat and the gun and the other crying, and the impatient sex wicking itself into the sheets. Inside the house are the original houses of my mother, my father. They fit the space exactly, wall against wall, all their plots and expositions, their little worlds carved out of materials at hand. How sweetly the gouges improve on the desktop’s varnish! How fiercely the pencil lead drives a darkness in, for remembrance. From up here, I lean down as if my life were a lesson I have to teach. Look, I say to myself, that’s you in the house, crumbling shredded wheat into the bowl. There’s your mother, so alive the hairs on her arm glisten. Listen, does she say anything to live by? No, it’s always the chimes, and the space between where everything else gets in.

4

What It Was Like My mother dragging the vacuum cleaner like a large cockroach room to room. My mother folded like a moth, sitting on the stoop. She’s not crying now, she sips her Pepsi through a straw. She’s “mad,” she says, as if it were only a bug in her throat. I grow alert as a deer. I grow aware of bad local grammar, hoards at the gate. I roar off with my friends down Dickson Street, bringing civilization to Arkansas in someone’s T-Bird. Some conglomerate picture shifting as if underwater, not that, but a womb-thickness. I push through, assembling as I go. I wish I could hold onto my mother’s feet, very small and white, high-arched, ticklish. Her feet only, far enough from her eyes. Her eyes in my memory: one brown pupil off to the side, trying to escape, the other dutiful, their hopeless drama. Don’t look at them, but at the mottled pattern of the linoleum countertop, the flared aluminum legs of the dinette, my rage equal exactly to my love, two pistons. You ask me what I remember: I’m halfway up Mt. Sequoyah on the other side, gasping for breath. I turn to catch the long Ozark valley, the glorious translucent yellow of maples. I’ll call it mothering because of the way the land and sky hold you, and at the same time lay a hand on the back of your neck like a dangerous lover. for Andrea Hollander Budy

5

Biology Lesson Ontology recapitulates phylogeny. I love the sound of that, the way heredity’s an automat set on a repeat serve. Compulsory rhyme, I’d say. I say it now, thinking of the pit to China we dug that summer in Dinah’s back yard. It was our upside-down doubles we were after. I think of us digging past lunch, past dinner, skinny and hunched over that yawning, impious link to the underworld. We were like the buck I saw yesterday in my path that outstayed me: concentrated, in love with might, maybe more with fear. The hole could go on forever, we could come out feet first on the other side, the soul of us yanked like a radish by some bathrobe-wearing, slant-eyed devil. We would divide from our old selves, a martyrdom. We would be born again. Again, we would start up with our plan to interrupt the plan. It would be our discipline. 6

Fayetteville Junior High When we weren’t looking, Mr. Selby married Miss Lewis. We tried to think of it, tiptoed Mr. Selby, twirling the edges of blackboard numbers like the sweet-pea tendrils of his hair, all his calculations secretly yearning away from algebra, toward Miss Lewis, legs like stone pillars in the slick cave of the locker room, checking off the showered, the breasted, flat-chested. All this: another world we never dreamed of inside the bells, the changing of classes: Selby and Lewis, emerging from rooms 4 and 16, holding hands like prisoners seeing the sky after all those years. “Bertha,” he says. “Travis,” she says. The drawbridge of the hypotenuse opens, the free-throw line slides forward, worn floor creaking. In homeroom, the smell of humans, rank, sprouting, yet this hope for us all.

7

Elegy for Donna We’d meet at the top of Garland Street to slam tennis balls, chase them like crazed pigeons. As soon as summer began its tremble, we’d start for the pool, maybe fifteen blocks to go. I want to live in the present there without a trace of memory. I want to head uphill into our longings again, to feel their heat, like heat from the sidewalks, its visible streamers. The sidewalk bumps and curves, tree roots turn and vanish, leaves thicken. Sweat breaks out; we’re walking as if we have forever, as if our destiny is not to die but to cross Maple Street, to get to the pool, the chemical blue, the dank locker room. I would like to dive in again, get my body clear, open my eyes to the silvered upper world. But this is all grown-up talk, thinking I know something now, when it’s only me, still, at the edge of the future as always, slapfooting around its rim, the whole space of it rippled and inner. Meanwhile, there was the afternoon, with fudgecicles. What did we talk about? Math and English and boys, but it might have been code for some divergence, some slight inconsistency begun that brought me here, her to Rochester, to die ten years ago today. Or what did we not say, that wedged between us walking home in our swimsuits, shirts tied at the waist? What happiness was that, what shiver?

8

The Explanation You could say it was because she wrote Mrs. James Lee so many times in study hall that the name spilled outward and caught her in its rings. You could trace the family history of loneliness that took her hand because she was next, or her actual fever the fall of ’62, so severe her father carried her, delirious, pajamas and all, to the bathtub and sat her in as she cursed him and her new town and all that kept her from love, which had become embodied for her already, at 17. (She had sent her love a photo of herself, smiling, in front of the grapevine, with the caption, “Grapes are a sign of fertility.”) And so he came and they bought the rings and they had the ceremony as if they were grown, and drove to Mountain Home for a honeymoon. But for God’s sake I think it’s time now after all these years to leave them alone in their black and white Chevy, to cut loose the clang of explanations. He’s steering and smoking with one hand, the other arm around her. She’s wearing her new white polyester blouse. He’s driving his first car, two weeks old, his sunglasses clipped over Buddy Holly frames. They’re only going from one state to the next, but the land spreads out, tractors and gas stations oblivious, contented. She lights a Tareyton, two years before the worst is known about that. She folds her new clothes again in her mind, 9

each one, including her first and only negligee, for that other newness, which really is, for them, because they’ve waited for this moment, in which she is Doris Day and he is, well, someone, and afterward they drink a beer and watch “Cheaper By the Dozen.” You could call it escape, all of it, playing. You could slip and say “mistake” instead of “escape.” You couldn’t know how straight toward their lives they were driving, barely a whisper in the other direction.

10

Knot Tying Lessons: The Slip Knot The most useful temporary knot or noose. What can I say? I turned a corner. No matter that I doubled back, there was still progress. I was lying low, crossing under both my coming and going, and when I rose to see where I was, felt the cool air on my face, I skidded like a skater, wrapped around myself again, burrowing back up through the small figure-eight I’d made of myself. How secure it all seemed, how sure to result in something unfaltering—patriotic, even. But the way things have gone, I’m left with a looseness through the center. There’s been this tendency to let things drop. It’s the opposites I have trouble with, the way my attention begins expanding as if the richness has eased past the borders, no longer lives in this constriction, this lump in my throat. I drew you to me with such firmness, you were sure of the implications. The exact point at which I began to be disappointed, who knows? The more I gave myself room to work it out, the more I felt the movement of possibilities within me. I should have felt relieved when all fell through, but I only felt what I am, how I’m made. “Open your mouth,” my mother used to say, coming at me with a bar of soap because of some word I’d said. I opened, as I do now, willing to take the bitterness, to have done what I did.

11

Makeup Regimen I’ve developed complicated pores, I need radiance, more beauty steps, more ice-colored bottles, the old me exfoliated so the young one can emerge dewy, daily. As if I could see my own face, as if the mirror reflected me by the shortest route instead of at crazy angles, all probabilities adding up to my face, as if it weren’t our ignorance that makes things appear in their classical forms. When the Newtonian God went away, what took His place acts more like rain, mist, sunshine, bounded by horizons du jour. Enter clarifying lotion, like the crisp, high range of stars. The face of night’s supposed to be naked and spread from ear to ear, but at dawn the workmen arrive with their electric saws, their hydraulic hammers; everything’s to be built again. The sum of it is complex: for example, my mother’s mouth in her coffin was all wrong. They made her look mature, confident. Their mistake was concentrating on the flesh, trying to fill the emptiness with it. She had her red suit on. They took her jewelry off when all we asked for was her ring, leaving her not quite put together forever. I like to think, though, that dying is like falling all the way back to where everything’s held to itself by memory. Two old men I knew in Arkansas would pass each other Mondays on their country road, driving so slowly they had time to ask after each other’s family. “Mr. Caid,” one would say, and nod. “Mr. Kimball,” the other would say, and nod. The main thing was to come along looking as much as possible like somebody same as the week before.

12

Delaware An old Candid Camera skit: two men stop cars at the border. “Delaware’s closed today,” they say, and the drivers docilely turn away. That’s me, I’d be still driving around looking. The way you ought to find a state is, things change. Fields, then you get to a difference that stays different, not this compass arc carved out of Pennsylvania, this right angle drawn away from Maryland. On a map, its name drifts in the Atlantic, neither here nor there. It lies inward like a cove on a creek, twigs and leaves swirled in, and sludge, and a faint orange ring you know is pollution, and then in a hard rain it all moves on and starts again: cancer slipping boundaries—highest breast cancer rate in the country, no one takes the blame, everyone’s from somewhere else, like New Jersey, the other side of the hypotenuse across the bay. In the middle, Salem Power Plant steams upward, refuses to take sides. In the south, the long slow marshes, cypresses, snow geese, herons. Good and evil cancel each other out—Delawhere?— the way the ocean tries to cancel out the shore, and the shore walks inland and forgets itself in relation 13

to anything else. I don’t know where I live. You need a breath between states, to be sure the next one’s coming. “Welcome to Oklahoma, to Missouri,” for instance. I remember Arkansas that way, as being not those other states. There have to be limits, skin and bones. The poetic version of home can open the mind like a trickor-treat bag and endlessly drop things in: Wilmington, Newark, Middletown, Smyrna, Lewes, Rehoboth, names our children learn, meaning their own caches of grief and joy, the resonances their ears have collected by now. But me, did I mention I’m starting to lose my hearing? Words grow softer, doing tricks and transformations. I could be in a hotel room, soft clicks in the hallway, a rumble. I can’t remember the number on the door, the sheets are empty pages. I try to identify boundaries, as the Buddha says, separate the strands of experience until there is no self, while the self is full with the moment, riding the waves of its own impermanence. I’ve said farewell, God knows, many times. The day we left Fayetteville, the three neighbor children lined up on the sad little mound of grass to wave goodbye to our son. It was summer,

14

and the sun took everything out of my eyes and kept moving. Like a fool, I’ve believed, though, in each place. The little creek behind our house runs clear, now rusty, now clear. Who or what causes this I do not know. Runoff from lawns, I’d guess, growing feathery weeds underwater, here, then gone. Still, there are minnows. And you, my utterly specific one, and our children, and our children’s children, ringing and crashing like deer to our salt lick, appearing in the morning mist as if through holes in the universe—their innocence and light—leaving small berries of scat, and tracks.

15

The Death of Cleone Of course she mistook her son for her husband, since it was the lake, and summer, and she had grown small and turning, as if the world were a kaleidoscope and she its center made only of mirrors. It was his voice, his hair, his height, so she let down her own white hair and set her lips on his before he realized. Still, when he held her hand at the end, he was willing to be anyone, and he talked to her of Central Lake again, and when he reached the edge of words, he took her arms and made a motion of paddling the canoe, and she did open her eyes across the small craft of her bed, gliding out into the last sliver of sun. She passed the dam at Bellaire, through Clam River, Grand Traverse Bay, Lake Michigan, into the dream-soup of details, of J-strokes. It was hard work against the drag of water, before she remembered she was a gull, and the water turned to air. No, not a gull. Not that far to go. Only back to Central Lake; she was one of the ducks lifting off, pulling up their landing gear in their awkward duck-flurry of voices, and it didn’t matter which one she was, or who it was that loved her, all of them winging around within the hollow of the lake. So began the silence, the evening, the turning stars.

16

II

Trillium Named for its trinity of leaves, of petals. The universe prefers odd numbers. It leans, obsessed with what’s next. It likes syllogisms, the arguments of sonnets: if A equals B, then C. The ground-level common denominator, the blood-red whorl at the base, is not an answer but a turning. Does that leave you dizzy? What can I say that would reassure either of us? Even our prayers have to catch hold as if we grabbed a spoke of a merry-go-round and tried to convince the universe of what we want stopped, reversed. What it gives us instead: this bad-smelling beautiful bloom. “Let go, let go,” is what it says, and who wants to hear that?

19

If Names Started Coming Loose Cow, for instance, might hook itself like a horseshoe around a fencepost. Chair might land on a cat, try to assimilate. Chickadee could shudder loose, to discover itself staid, roomy, with a two-car garage. The ones left behind? Vaporous, probably afraid, not yet knowing how to live inside discontinuities. Meanwhile, cow would quite naturally be grafting itself as efficiently as possible to the fencepost, upright, unflinching, drawing no flies. Like the rest of us, it would be willing to go for a small part of the truth, a little more onomatopoeia, a little less floating. Try to think of it: your name, the one you’ve repeatedly handed out to strangers, now landed, say, onto the huge steel patio grill. “I’ll just throw these burgers on the Maryann,” someone might say. And you would be moving like a rumor among named objects, not unnoticed entirely, but treated with the maneuvering of the other guests who know they must know you, but can’t quite recall . . . Makes you want to hang on, doesn’t it? It does me. To admit to myths, vow beliefs you never thought you’d settle for. That’s the part of you that wants to live inside mere obedience forever, place the salad fork on the outside, 20

pass the potatoes clockwise. But then, suppose there’s the lightness beginning to come on, incredible continents inside you, rising and breaking apart, the voice you never knew was yours. Suppose it’s so good it has no name.

21

Small Boys Fishing under the Bridge 1 I watch them try and try for nothing but tiny bluegill, sunfish, crawdads even, anything to feel a tug, though they’d call it necessity, as if they had to feed a dozen mouths. They bend over the night crawlers with a whopping knife, too jagged, in love with tools, machines, reels. They’re serious, removed, all of them, threading half-worms as bravely as they can, leaving me out of it, trying to act as if the oozing is normal, required, after all they’ve been taught about kindness.

2 It’s excitement and mystery under here, a boat churning through, echoing against the bridge, and Zach, pulling up his bluegill at last, shining and flapping. He stops its fins down with his fist. The fish looks at him, one eye at a time, from its other world. From this one, the meaning seems clear: the yanked hook, the yellow plastic live well barely wide enough for a fish. But there’s the human to figure in, the complications of its mind, as it crouches beside in splashed and sticky shorts.

22

3 After the hammer-blow, it’s not so hard to scrape scales into a universe of stars, to saw off the head, fish-quivers giving way to plain flesh. What lesson can be learned by this? It seems like no lesson on the blue-willow plate—only eating or being eaten, which turns out at last to be a quiet exchange, nothing that could have been helped, desire being what it is, and fish like little knives pointed toward it all the time. for Josh, Zach, Noah, and Daniel

23

Light I don’t want to get started on such a nice night, but when I’m standing out here and the security light’s blasting from the boathouse over the way, incessantly headed my direction as light does across water and I can’t see the stars only orange bug-light and the nasty-wasp Jet Skis angled half out of the water and who’s going to roar off on them at night anyway and I’m without the big dipper or the little or the entire dark past or the crawdads under the dark, and even swimming nude is problematical in that glow that’s intended to mean I try to figure what, here we are in the suburbs, maybe, because the dark’s dangerous, and me, I like to walk out barely seeing my feet, just flicking on a light at the end of the dock, not to go too far, and then when it’s off I’m floating with only the upper world breaking through in pinpricks we’ve given names to, in our idleness or fear, but nothing like this tactless yowling of light. Wouldn’t you think there’d be boundaries, like when a car drives by rocking with bass and I can’t hear myself think, wouldn’t you think there’d be some respect for people’s secrets, invisible as they are, some acknowledgment that the invisible’s worth something, that I’m here, that there’s a god of some sort that picks up steam in the dark spaces, the more dark, the more chance—so I try to turn my back to the light, but is it awful of me now to remember Kraków, Kabul, Monrovia, the yellow bombs in the night saying Kilroy Was Here, to want to stand on this dock representative of my version of history, declaring no more light, no more sight of Jet Skis taking no risks with their noses in the air, wouldn’t you think the dark would finally get angry, at least in my lifetime, and I could watch the retribution, the darkening, that the stars would begin to reach earth with their clear messages, that they would have something to say after all that distance about traveling through their opposite, doesn’t it seem reasonable that I would want to stand on the dock and wait for them to arrive? 24

Red Paint Here is my father, lying sideways on the dock trying to scrub off blood-red marine paint. Here are his old hands and forearms, bloody, everything he touches, bloody. My words are so bloody, as usual, I try not to say them. I could be ten years old, mopping up my brother’s blood after another seizure. My father’s acting like he’s ten, as usual, smearing paint everywhere. If you knew the history. I drive to the lumberyard after paint thinner. “Don’t move,” I say. I douse the dock with thinner, too. “Oh, for heaven’s sake,” he says. “In World War II, they used to splash red paint on the decks to get the men used to blood.” “Oh, well,” I say, because he will die sooner than later, because the sun is a white eye, and I’ve cleaned up the dock under the willow, because the water’s sloshing, gone and permanent in its way. Because his sailboat’s sleek with red, a missile cradled on sawhorses. “Merely cosmetic,” my father says about my cleaning, as if I’ve wasted my life. A body doesn’t like to spill, I think. Not even light spills. Look at the sun, stopped by leaves, trunks of trees. There are sorrows like hot stones, they give birth in silence. There is my Mother scrubbing a bathroom in heaven, folding sheets, getting to have her version of nice. “Mother,” I say, to remind the universe I’m here, holding back with my bare hands what still needs holding back. 25

Poverty of Spirit Tina and her gypsy women roll in with their wagon, storm the garage in their boots, shorts, and bleached hair. I let them take everything, cheaply —illegally—I know it when she says don’t worry about the paint cans, she has this pit behind her house, and the other things she can burn. It’s the fires of Hell, dying birds, poisoned wells. I also regret the wood, one perfectly clear 80-year-old 4 by 6, some original cedar siding, and other straight pieces, but they’re laughing and smoking and things are flying out of the garage, and Tina’s in the wagon like God Almighty, retying her red bandana, arranging the past into a party, and then the wind blows through the emptiness, the scent of dryness, July and its bad habits, and I am surer than usual that I will die, that my soul is exactly the same room it was before it collected the skin and bones, that it will be back to that, eventually. I get up off the bank, wipe my hands on my jeans, kind of a prayer for forgiveness, trying for a poverty of spirit, the right kind you choose item by item, not letting it get out of hand like nuclear fission. Old paint with dangerous, leachable lead, now I’ve said it, that’s the critique of me I was looking for. And then I pick mint, and chew a few leaves, rough and sharp, a taste that’s more than half smell, and then I sweep out dry leaves and swing the doors shut, spin the combination lock, which is 12–0–45, not that it matters, unless I need to check later, to see how much nothing there is in there, to work with. 26

Ode to the Buffman Brothers Timmy’s so big he’s awkward as a loon on land, but when he gets on his backhoe and his brother Luke on his Bobcat, you can believe we were born for machinery. They get the big maple ready to go, Timmy rubs the backhoe’s neck against its trunk, slowly up and down until it begins to crack, as we all would, and falls through a perfect tunnel of trees, wild hair every which way, Luke scooping it, and the smaller ones, into the huge dump truck. Then they really begin, Timmy with his delicate biting and scooping, clanging the small head down on the cement walk, lifting a chunk to the dump truck like a dead mouse, Luke backing and twirling in place. They do-se-do to the low rumble of motors. They come right to the edge of the house’s foundation, they bite out a row of stones around the old ice-house, they leave a perfect cliff, you should see it, roots exposed like the wiring of the world, the smell of dirt and rocks and roots. Another thing: yesterday, they said, at six-thirty a double rainbow landed about here. They said it was a oncein-a-decade rainbow, and I missed it. This is what I mean about them, what I can’t get enough of. They make me want to start over from scratch. 27

Knot Tying Lessons: The Clove Hitch An important basic knot often used to fasten sail ratlines to shrouds. Under our house, a bed of blacksnakes, seeping out in waves, harmless, huge, coldly wrapping around themselves, working against themselves, circling each other under and under, then there goes one up and under the top: hello, hello, goodbye, goodbye, although Ron, who’s digging to build our retaining wall, stomps down sweaty as a martyr, whistling, into the ditch they just deserted, still licked by imaginary tongues. The way they move through his mind, they could slither out of anything, hushed as a thousand years, clean along the lines of least resistance. It’s the weight of gravity, I guess, that puts the fear in us, the thought of the knot made to hold, slipping loose at last. The very thing that keeps Ron at it, building something opposite, familiar, upright, stone on stone. 28

Flying Ants They appear like spots in the eye, no explanation, dozens of them, winged, huge, on cue as the sun hits the eating porch between five and six, down the wall, not attacking exactly, but clearly bound for permanence, checking out the territory. Swatting and spraying notwithstanding, they bring their friends, feeling their way down the door, a prophecy. So okay, I call the exterminator; I toss my Buddhist prohibitions as if I’ve never sat on a cushion. I sincerely dislike their clever hinged bodies, their fierce faces you can barely see under their flailing antennae and broad banshee foreheads coming on like the final chapter, and what can one do—that’s the point—against their gutinstinct mindless as a lynch mob? I can be having my glass of wine, evening sun striking the lake at its low sparkle-angle, but my mind keeps turning corners, alert for signs of trouble, working hard to slow the pace of things, preoccupied as Jesus watching in the garden for wings, only the welcome kind. Sometimes it’s so lonely on this earth, so much I don’t know. Even the sky has its other side, and soon will let through only glints of what now seems true.

29

For My Daughter’s Fortieth Birthday Particles that were once connected will, when separated, behave as if still connected, regardless of the distance between them. John Stewart Bell

Einstein called it “spooky action at a distance.” I’m rubbing my nose, and what are you doing, now, dear one? What parts are we putting together? I dragged you into this. What age is like, really, I had no idea: turns out, the present settles into its nest of memories and likes it there, even when it stings. Let me start over. I am walking North Intermediate Lake Road on October 7th, not long till your birthday, sun on spider webs— stop signs of dew and sun, one after the other, strung across stalks, a bloom-field of sun-charges with their studious lines to the center. Time’s turned out to be my subject. It climbed the ladder of my attention, spinning its internal juices, never using itself up. It hasn’t been pushy. It’s begun to feel like my best friend. Let me start over. Memory’s not as easy as I said: it muscles horribly upwards, sometimes, bigger than I am, carrying nasty details in its arms. I keep eating them like a spider, so not everything will come your way. I like to think of you where you are right now, driving kids to school in Massachusetts. 30

I’m walking the lake road in Michigan, watching leaves turn and burn in the eye of Time. How dear it is to me, the way it holds you in its sundazzled arms as you round a curve and brake at the sign, squinting your dozen little wrinkles.

31

The Moon Is Moving Away The moon is moving away from earth an inch a year. In the old days, it was almost entirely romance and danger, but even with our precarious tilt, we started thinking science would win. Though without the moon, we’d wobble: burn/freeze, burn/freeze. It’s hung on, a soundless pendulum between us and oblivion. Even after the one giant step, the tragedies, it shines up there like a quarter, that old image. However, even an occasional rhapsody in its favor is largely ignored by the media. The only thing that would get their attention is if it toppled off the edge of gravity and left us lurching, or if the man in the moon turned out to be made of oceans as marketable as the Caribbean. Unfortunately, what romance does is remind us of loss, which makes us sad, or makes us joust at windmills in the name of our ideals, which is why we keep giving it up. Romance makes me think of my mother, who must have sat on the dock the same way I’m doing now and looked at the moon in the water. I imagine her still beautiful, my father still overseas. I recommend the moon on such occasions to loosen up the tight fit of life: its childlike willingness to reflect back our own thoughts, its apparent ease as it moves imperceptibly toward its private fate. 32

No Heron Herons are bigger than egrets, though they have the same long legs. My father said one with an eight-foot wingspan flew over his boat. I would like to be shadowed by something that big. It would seem like poetry, just out of reach, moving and making a bare flush of wings, and I would think of it long after, the way it was heading away from me. My longing would not be satisfied even if I could grab its scrawny legs in my hand, even if it nuzzled up to me. I would be looking up the origin of heron with my free hand, and when I read Greek, to creak, and Old High German, to scream, I would wait for it to begin, but it would not say anything to me in this boat which I am not in, but at my desk hoping for the heron, a big one, as I said, so I can say, “Wow, look at that!” as if I were getting up a circus. Out there are herons white and blue, not really blue but smoky, with wings bigger than their bodies, dipping and standing motionless beside lakes and rivers. Out there are universes expanding until the space between atoms is too far to do anyone any good. Thus, somewhere this minute one heron is calculating the distance between his beak and a fish, the way it shifts. It is as if he travels in space until heron and fish are swallowed into each other. There is no heron at my desk. In fact, the absence of heron is how I would define my study: no heron on the ceiling, no heron on the floor, no heron on the wall, so that of course I think of nothing but heron, how it floats its weight on one leg, for example, flying that way even when it’s not.

33

Knot Tying Lessons: The Perfection Knot A favorite loop among anglers, it has survived the advent of slippery nylon monofil, which has rendered many other knots obsolete. How do we keep from going mad, starting over with marriages and children, making the same mistakes? Over and over, we leave behind the buoys that marked the shallows we should have seen. They bob like zeros behind us, counting for or against, who can be sure? Maybe everything was simpler than we thought from the start, perfect as the disk of the sun, and the first loop we took was never supposed to be tied in some frivolous bow. Maybe we were to come through the loop bravely, cross its outer border until we could see clearly how it was we began all this, slip under what we used to think was the route, until we caught our waywardness in a noose, and nothing could slip loose. Maybe it’s the kind of thing you have to teach your hands to do without puzzling too much about it, the way you faithfully get up, go to work, come home. Like the rotation of the planets, you have to believe that just because no one says so, doesn’t mean you aren’t okay, more than okay, really, in your devotion to what you can’t exactly explain.

34

III

Bladder Campion They come in airy flotillas on each stem, little flowerblimps, propellers of petals at their back ends, which makes me think how heavy with history we are, and how alone, thus forgivably prone to personification of the gods. We imagine the little bladders puffing themselves out because of their excellent and homeopathic ideas, the barely earthbound kind that no one takes seriously until they save the world. Every story we tell is only Horatio Alger, a pale, yellowish, and ordinary boy at the end of the row in junior high, who finally amounts to something. A surprise, a profusion of campion, to demonstrate that after the guns, the tanks, the barbed wire we wanted so desperately to avoid in our story, blooms will spread back across like plain, kind words.

37

Perspective Map Looking at Richard Edes Harrison’s perspective map, “Southeast to Asia,” originally published as “Southeast to Armageddon” in the March 1942 issue of Fortune magazine. You’d never suspect a thing, dotted borders, spider veins of highways, the earth curved as an eyeball from up here. I kissed my mother’s forehead the day she died, that’s what it feels like, the height. I like Tibet, pushed up at the edge of India like a giant wave, which becomes the spine of Afghanistan, Iran, down to Turkey. It’s hard to say “gunfire,” or “mutilated bodies,” with those orange wrinkles blooming like marigolds, those lighter plains with the sprawled lettering, the Tigris and Euphrates forming a violin on their way to the Persian Gulf. Still, it’s hard to miss the oil rigs tethered where they meet, the double bowstring of the pipeline from Kirkuk almost to Amman. From up here, though, it could be a craze line in porcelain, or roots. The space between here and there is sheer, my body an ark on the sea of it. I could go on forever, except I can almost feel it coming on, the startled presence, winged, with the troublesome branch in its bill.

38

Mouse I admire the way mouse dashes across the top bracket of the blinds while we’re reading in bed. I admire the tiny whip of its tail at the exact second my husband tries to grab it. I admire the way it disappears into our house and shreds various elements. I admire the way it selects the secret corridors behind cupboards and drawers, the way it remains on the reverse side of our lives. The mouse is what I think of when I think of a poem, or of music, going straight for the goods, around the barrier of our thoughts. It leaves droppings, pretending to be not entirely substantial, falling apart a little here and there. Clearly, it has evolved perfect attention to detail. I wish it would concentrate on the morning news, pass the dreadfulness out in little pellets. Yesterday I found a nest of toilet paper and thought I’d like to climb onto that frayed little cloud. I would like to become the disciple of that mouse and sing “Wooly Bully” in a tiny little voice in the middle of the night while the dangerous political machines are all asleep. I would like to have a tail for an antenna. But, I thought, also, how it must be to live alone among the canyons of cabinets, to pay that price, to look foolish and trembling in daylight. Who would willingly choose to be the small persistent difficulty? So I put out a spoonful of peanut butter for the mouse, and the morning felt more decent, the government more fair. I put on my jeans and black shirt, trying not to make mistakes yet, because it seemed like a miracle that anyone tries at all.

39

Birthday Speaking of mortality: over the inlet yesterday, two air-show planes clipped wings. One dove into the sea, pilot drowned—another loss in the recent sea of them, as particular as the rest, people leaning on the railings, watching out for hours the way we do when to turn away would seem to be forgetting. Today’s my birthday. I take the kids to Bachmann’s, buy them what they want— Styrofoam planes—and walk them to the field. Jake’s wide-winged 747 scribes a mighty arc around the apple tree, half-free of us—one flight out of four. It has to be positioned right, wings slid forward in the slot, ailerons—if you can call the slight flaps that—bent down. We’re giddy with the odds for tragedy. Samantha’s picked a smaller plane, its wings too short, fuselage too fat. It spirals down and slams, nose first, nearly every time. She’s crying. It’s my birthday. The whole idea was happiness. “Guess what?” I say. “The spaceship Apollo landed on the moon exactly on my birthday, 1969.” I don’t say it was only dust

40

and rock up there. I lie on my back in the grass, feet up, balance Sam on her stomach and swing her back and forth until she’s laughing, nothing to do with proportion, only to do with the delicate sky, and resistance, and drag, and wind-sheer, the grand design that settles the horizon down around us. for Jacob and Samantha

41

Twelfth Wedding Anniversary Poem I’ve lasted three days longer now than marriage number two, a week longer than my number one. But the twenty-three years you shared with your previous darling—I have a ways to go. Still, we have to account for the way time compresses, distills. We’ve been together barely nineteen percent of your life, now, twenty percent of mine. All that wake behind us, that strife, it’s as if we’re wading through peanut butter. Neither of us keeps souvenirs, other than our children, but every time you touch my elbow, the inside of my wrist, I think of the difference. Not think. The undertow of the past sounds a tone against that spot like a temple bell under my skin. We’re never entirely alone. Let me put it this way: suppose we go to the matinee, our known life left out there in the sun. We’re ready to fling ourselves into the plot, shed a few tears, which is the fun of it. Something new. Then we’re stunned by the inside light, made of all our infinite remembered people and places, reshuffled to form this exquisite, this strange tale. Sure, it makes us sad, or sorry, but the edifice itself is pure bliss: all of us here, we’re all caught up in the kiss.

42

Wild Lily of the Valley Among the ordinary lilies of the valley, their bells lined up neat as choristers, you’re the country cousin, tiniest sparkler of bloom, stamen projecting, nothing shy about you. And who isn’t sexy under the trees by the lake, who isn’t a little aggressive, full of the need to ignore the rules, to say something directly out of the thunder of ground, the whole dark that spawned us? Nothing greater than sex. The dark would run on forever without it. You show up with your frowsy equipment powered by two clapping leaves, to unbalance the civil town. Or, it may be my mind taking hold, tangling desire in my hair until it is all a Medusa’s coil, something we come to together.

43

Rubbing Feet I do love the rubbing, the putting pressure to bear. I love the bony, coral-like base from which our lives rise democratically, their mutual aggrieved history, the quid pro quo, I do you, you do me, the more the better, better than sex, the way it goes on and on as the mystery we are to each other and to ourselves works itself gradually, mutely, closer to the surface. I’m cheered by the way we take hold of the separate, colder regions, the ten brave peninsulas, as if it were possible to speak words of hope directly through them upward to the mainland. It’s all a particular, terrible, blunt attention. I remember the two old women in heavy coats at the corner of 49th and Broadway who kept stroking each other’s cheeks and crying while the crowd passed to either side as if they were a single black rock. Couldn’t they see how the women were praying for them, singing for them, how happy the women were?

44

Reading Poetry at the Horse Meadow Senior Center We’d been told fish for lunch, so we took bets on how it would be cooked and I guess I won, although we couldn’t be sure if it was baked or broiled under the sauce, which, being guests, we pushed around against the spinach. Not true: some of us ate, including Syd, who lived nearby and said don’t joke, he might be here someday, and we were all scanning tables, seeing our own bodies rounding back to creation, our exact and precious sufferings slowly leaking out. The beached whale of poetry, I thought, not seeing Syd but myself, exhausted into prose. Syd got up, as directed, post-scrod and pre-cobbler, so people wouldn’t drift away, and he read a poem that played up the local, and then I pulled the mike toward them as far as the cord went, using my old joke about the end of my rope, and they laughed, and I started with a poem about my daughter that seemed to end right. Then I read “Dock” because of its repetition, so they wouldn’t miss rhyme too much, that elephant in the room. I had time between to think of Longfellow, the way “shining big sea waters” lies off in the varnished distance and leaves a person free afterward to take a nap. Then I read the one about my grandfather forgetting where he was and thought halfway through, uh-oh, but they smiled and clapped, sure of where they were, and by this time those who wanted it had finished a second dish of peach cobbler and I felt really happy, useful, part of the general flow of things. I felt like a closing line myself, made of nothing but words intended to swim out into the stratosphere, but caught, luckily, among the wheelchairs and walkers.

45

Elegy for a Woman Killed on New London Road by a Flying Deer As the deer hit the hood of the first car and flew backward into her own windshield, hoofs and fur, I hope there was an instant when it was not just surprise, but something important. Maybe the doomed pass matter-of-factly from one state to another, but I hope they note the transition with interest, their attention for once exact and full. She’s definitely got my attention, with the deer rocketing on, wild nostrils, wild eyes that also know this is it—the final event that comes fast and slow at once. Whatever faith I have, shattering is where it starts. I have her feeling gorgeous for a second, her old fictions of herself flying headlong and light as the holy ghost into the actual creature. I have her devoted for that second to love, meaning certain tendencies fulfilled. Finally, the alternations, the in and out of breath, the eating and eliminating, the loving and hating, meeting without caution or shame—not in theory, but in fur, eye, tuft of ear-hair, hoof, glass, bone: flaring, fused.

46

The Student on the re- casting of “The Student,” a statue by Charles Parks in front of the Newark Free Library, Newark, Delaware Who could tell if he’s not the same, re-cast and set back on the same pedestal, Abe Lincoln beard roughed and aflame with sun again, same bare Huck Finn feet and rolled-up trousers, wrinkles burned solidly in, firm veins? If he could see— if he looked up he’d see the scene slightly changed, new library turned now toward trees and parking lot. But he’s perfectly into himself, the way most of us are, replaced but not lost every seven years, within our shimmering cell-change. Maybe in his brass heart he’s glad to be starting over, but he would like to know a lot of things, like what he means, his deliberate mass placed here, book upside down on his lap, not reading but thinking about what he’s reading, or dreaming, a dreamer induced by the reading. I feel like a thread let loose from his thoughts: off, floating, wondering if I’m any better after all my farewells, my changes, than I used to be, if I wear this body more gracefully, if anyone can tell.

47

The Girl Thit Got Struck with Lightning title of a book made by Noah, age 5, a week before the birth of his baby sister Page 1: Stick-legged girl. In spite of tough arms sprouting out of her head, and glove-hands, lightning zips through her. Or, she could be lightning itself, part of its yellow plan. Page 2: Overhead, clouds soldier on. A bad time, calling for big booms, two on the right, two on the left, a sky of rain-dots, and lightning. She’s been born to it, she has to take it: eyelashes, pupils, exclamation points of fingers. Page 3: Sun comes out in the upper corner, ceiling of blue sky, nothing wicked in sight. She stands alone, smiling, arms askew. Page 4: “Ouch, ouch,” she says. Lightning lurks inside her dress, sun smiling like a huge zinnia. Page 5: Parents call, “Time for dinner,” in front of a house. The house grows a vine of green lightning on its side, but that, says Noah, is The End. People have dinner and want her there. She hasn’t been destroyed, just poked, hard. The thin body of the house isn’t telling. 48

Indian River Inlet, I March: nothing here but a blank tinkertoy city of docks, and one revved-up loon piercing the watery center with its sharp, ancient beak. All alone, it locks and unlocks the depths. I remember to think how weird for a bird to fly through water. Meanwhile, little pings, mooring rings nudging shoulders with the pilings, and I’m shifting foot-to-foot on the balcony, waiting for the loon to show, wondering why it divides itself, how it knows how. I wonder if it’s mocking me. A fishing boat comes through. Red and blue jackets emerge, attach tough lines. Way out, dashing along: eight wild sails. If the sea were thrashing, we’d be saved by that exclamatory wall of posts. It’s all dangerous: water, air, these railings and thermal doors. It’s a wonder anyone leaves the womb, that we haul our sails up into this. Notice how far I’ve come, though— I want credit, here—to swing this far out between one thing and another. It’s hard, given my dumb, uncontrollable impulse toward harbor. I like to go down and pull the covers over, but here’s the loon again, rhyme leaps up. It’s a radical world, a boat pitching around at its lines, that one there cheerily named Lost Time.

49

For Bill, Injured in Final Dress Rehearsal You greet us, your pound of flesh nothing but pounds, foot propped on pillows. You’ve kept your ratty Shylock beard, though, repeating lines every day in case you mend. Cast out, smarting, a whole life prepared, only to let the understudy go on with it: like divorce, someone else raising the children. Well, not that bad, but still. To keep that Jew on life-support week after week, snorting his snorts, lifting your head to his arrogant pitch. Oh, the others may call him cruel, vindictive. “What judgment shall I dread,” you repeat, “doing no wrong? You have among you many a purchased slave. . . .” and so on. You prop Shylock up inside your fate. You take him for a drive— something you can do with your good foot. You point out a blond kid zipping by on his skateboard, two thin swatches of green hair floating backward, an Ariel come up through seaweed. You use him to demonstrate our contradictory urges, the way we strain against mercy, that wants ease, but we need house lights down, curtain up. in memory of Bill Leach

50

Lady’s Slipper Where are you going in your yellow kayak with your curlicue leafpaddles, your one red-flecked petal-sail? How will you get there over the great fern-waves, under the young maples, the doomed elms? I question your ability to survive, this close to the road in the twenty-first century, but the apparent ease with which you’ve arisen and blown yourself into translucence makes me think you could go on forever, after all, and alone, making the cup of yourself out of nothing but loamy woods. I recognize bravery when I see it, the way it opens, the way it enters itself so that all that remains is flower.

51

Oppressions 1. Arthritis The old men climb out of cars, considering each rotation of ball and socket— the workings of their bodies recently separate, inscrutable. They don’t wince because it would be a long road ahead, wincing, though they observe with some surprise the way pain is quietly passionate, like an old wife. They touch a hip, a knee, to settle down a flame they haven’t energy for, one that calls them back each time they start to go.

2. Hot Flashes As the skin wears thin, desire itself begins to burn through, to set fire to the old unspoken angers, the times nobody’s mentioned since, the years that turned away unfinished. God! Who wouldn’t melt, all the building up, the changing, the trying to stay the same? 52

Now it’s got to be wrung out of the nightgown, the sheets. On the table, an entire book devoted to nothing but night, flared open, face down.

3. Bunions In the old neighborhood, suffering was endured. Whoever got in trouble, the sighs of the mothers were as good as forgiveness. As if they knew a secret subcutaneous beauty. No one had to tell them that if so much as a foot rubs to ruin, the mind will begin to toughen against it, and one day the balance will shift: surprised by the hard city of its own making, it will turn inward against itself.

4. High Blood Pressure How can it keep on, she asks: same heart, same birdlike flaps, same arteries roaring like trees, same mad

53

squirrels filling holes? Capillaries so thin blood cells travel single file. She imagines the fragile exchange, CO2 fighting back to the heart, the lungs. The nuclear plants steaming, the fields of guns crammed with ambition. When she gets this way, he slides his hand down her back to demonstrate again love floating like a raft.

54

Through Security I take off my boots because of their steel shanks. I take out my orthotics, place my coat and purse in the bin, place my carry-on on the belt. I take off my shirt, my jeans, my bra. I take out my contacts. I take off my makeup and earrings, strip the dye from my hair. I relax my stomach to its honestly protruding shape. Still, it’s all over the TVs about me. I’m buzzed again as if there’s been no progress at all since the club-carrying, the dragging-by-the-hair. I take off my skin, veins flying like ropes, organs dropping away one by one. I address the additional matter of bones: unfasten ball from socket, unhook ligaments, leave the electronic eye no place to rest. I am almost ready to go, if I could quit thinking, the thinking that goes on almost without knowing, the tiny person crossing her legs in the back of the mind, the one who says, “I still love you, dear guilty flesh.”

55

Walker Equally office or lounge, it allows you to fold down its seat, set the hand brakes, and reach into its brownflowered Velcro-attached cotton bag for cell phone, or pen. It’s slim enough to roll between refrigerator and door, and, with brakes, you can come to the brink of the stairs, alone. You can pull close to the sink and shred lettuce, and if you knock some leaves to the floor, you can reach in your bag and retrieve with the long-handled clamp, unless the leaves are thin and frail, in which case someone will gather them up later, in the silent collusion of the sick and the well, both of you sure now what love is, the solid shell of what may have seemed nebulous before, but which turns out to be silence, dishrag, plate, and lettuce. Especially for you, love has entered inanimate objects. Between you and them exists a new intimacy. Who wouldn’t feel a little jealous? Your walker’s your little Florida, your getaway, your awkward moves together turned to grace, the space between here and there your common fate. When you lean together, it doesn’t look like tiredness, more a new idea you both just had, the world turned resolute and recent. At the window, a cardinal thrums its song to you both, cold as aluminum.

56

Indian River Inlet, II I notice angels finally fell out of fashion, after maybe ten years of pumping up and down the ethereal plane of poems, poking their feet through the membrane of reason. Maybe the unseen got bored with landing behind the scenes and decided to step plainly onstage holding a diagrammed sentence, the ribs of how wings work. In any case, here it’s only seagulls, trying to wow space with their cries, and the hum of a solitary water pump in the background. I don’t mind growing old without angels. By now I know the way plain vowels and consonants lump up to push things along. Motion’s always sounded like wings. Maybe it’s herald of something, maybe not. A hundred twenty-seven posts hold up the dock out there, one by one, so it appears to float. The shoreline across appears to float in the bay. Whoever I am floats on the bony construction of my body. I’ve never seen my face firsthand. It’s kind of fun, going through life guessing; it’s the best part, actually, like stepping off a cliff every second, never hitting bottom because there’s always one more. Like having wings, but less dignified.

57

58

IV

Jack in the Pulpit The Jack in the Pulpit folds over itself like a safety pin. It’s deep in the woods, the hatchling of a dream in which the red-veined and phallic manages to seduce you with the graceful curve of vestments. You might like to think of it as a small ship with sail unfurling toward a New World, the excitement of discovery—yours—but it acts more like a held tongue, because when you can’t go anywhere, privacy becomes your grace. What did Donne know, or Jonathan Edwards? The air itself curls, and down inside, only a hummingbird is able to figure it out.

61

Knife Coach Cars of Days Is the happy part days or moments later? Earlier? Things slide through, a Metroliner of metaphors: Thanksgiving, Christmas, bearing up against the sudden walls, tattered flags, truck beds, concrete pipes, corrugated brown warehouses, silted ponds with geese. Refuse and rust, the various ball fields, one game in progress, its flush and fuss, no reference to us. On the train to Boston for Thanksgiving. Or, all of us at the long table with the china, plate after plate of shining destination.

A Moment Suspended Like a Plumb Line Over the motion of seasons, Thanksgiving and Christmas. Or like a knife, or whatever is used to saw open your brain to go after the tumor the size of a tangerine, caught in the crux of the optic nerves, at the carotid artery, the pituitary. The delicacy of this requires ignoring metaphor. Even though a person’s transformed—moment, moment, moment—the trick is in keeping track. The trick’s in staying with you like a surgeon. Who cares who our crazy father is, our poor mother was? I help you snap the flapping green gowns, one in front, one in back. They put your clothes in a plastic sack.

The Aesthetically Pleasing Shape of the Human Body The lesser is to the greater as the greater is to the whole: the Golden Section: cross, crux, crucial, crucifix. In front of St. Mary’s hospital in Saginaw, Michigan, the statue of Mary stands demure, bronze, encouraging. But high over the main doors, she’s art deco, almost gone already, refined to memory, an aerodynamic flame.

The Unfaithfulness of the Mind The way it keeps drifting up and down, forward and back, the sign of the cross. Thursday, the night before, John made quattro 62

formaggi pizza. Pizza Giovanni, he said. This time last year you were in Florence together. It’s extraordinary, all of it, the pencil point of a tumor you were born with, and now, its arrogance, assertiveness. And the breath that’s traveled though a corridor so many times it believes it’s entitled. As if the unimaginably vast universe could agree to keep meeting itself like this! Corridor. Corridor clicking along: door, door, door, a movement like the bowels, the diaphragm, carrying us.

The Speechlessness of the Sun Rising over the fields on our way to the hospital, huge orange Midwest sun, spreading like butter along the snow-ripples. Christmas lights still on, the shapes of trees and reindeer, those night messages, even as the sun starts up again. I try to think what the messages might contribute to the general silence. Deliver me from metaphor. I can deal with the painted windows of the hospital lobby—an angel on a yellow star, dangling his feet, a pink-nosed mouse carrying a spotted Christmas ornament, a yellow-chested penguin—because of their obvious intention. The angel, the mouse, the penguin keep trying for three and a half hours as we wait to hear from surgery.

Silence As If Heard from the End of a Tunnel At the end of the tunnel, your shocked, quivering body, curled, cut to the core, the ventilator, the mass of tubes. I know I’m living right now, complexly, many chambered. I touch your cheek, the you-and-notyou. The bruised right eye flowering, the brain seizing, trying to steady itself like a small craft. How long I have lived, finally to see how we can be ripped in a moment far from ourselves. How time can be collected into glucose bags, urine bags, potassium bags. I am touching your arm as if it were our mother’s arm, or my other arm, disappearing.

63

The Shiftlessness of the Landscape A couple more inches of snow. John has a tree sent, and your sons and I hang every silly ornament, trying to get them right. Your neighbors have tacked their usual obscenely pink bows on greenery. What’s been withheld, the garish, begins to shine forth, unencumbered. Thanksgiving to Christmas, the year moves to finish itself, its other nature.

A Knife Passing through Butter Barely Disturbs a Thing The molecules part, the atoms steer their flocks of electrons to either side, like mother ducks. How spacious matter is, spacious as a laugh, the way it opens the diaphragm. Here’s a joke: your head wrapped in gauze, tuft of hair, tube sticking out the top. You’re a cartoon sick person! The tube drains off blood: ah, an escape route from the interior. I don’t know now if we could have escaped our childhood after all, even though we tried as hard as standup comedians. Here are the smiling nurses, keeping the machines occupied while you go on getting away. When we came, it was just past Thanksgiving. Now it’s past New Year’s, nothing between.

How Satisfying Is the Knife, How Pure I envy the knife; it is all performance. It has no interest in the infinitely slow absorption of blood back into the brain, the wheeze of the respirator. I envy the CT scan, the slices of brain backlit on the screen in scientific portions so thin no one need feel sorry for any one of them. I envy the white areas and the gray, the way they keep their own counsel. I begin to suspect that days are a human creation, that the light and dark cancel each other out. To stand by your bed is to be nothing. Your tongue is a little bit out, your one eye a little bit open, but none of this has to do with you.

64

Things That Could Happen (1) A nuclear bomb could tire of waiting. (2) Global warming could keep on melting the icecaps until a huge amount of methane gas is released that causes further warming, forming a cloud so dense as to block out the sun, causing a deep freeze. (3) High energy particle accelerators could create hyperdense “strange matter” that attracts nearby nuclei, thus growing larger until the entire planet is compressed into a sphere no more than 100 meters in diameter and rolls away under the bed like a lost nickel.

What Actually Happens What actually happens when I speak to you, after the tiny bones of hammer, anvil, stirrup? After the internal seas, waving their 20,000 cilia? What happens after their little electric jolts to the brain? What happens when I call the family, one by one, on my cell phone? Between the word and the word, nothing but radio signals. I could be saying a poem—who knows what happens out of sight between the words? And who knows if what comes up on the other side is past or future? I could be Jonah, trying to say something from here about fear and hope, those lozenges of abstraction, among the slippery fishbelly ligaments.

Cradle of Words Remember now in your sleep the prayers of various flavors of Christians, of Jews, of the one Muslim in the hospital lab, of Buddhists, of several atheists, in their way—the many who offered to carve for you out of the dark a bright cradle of words upon which you can be carried. This one please carry. Carry on myth, on history. Encrust this one with our longing, with the magic longing calls its own. Saw this one in half and let her emerge whole. Through whatever narrow sleeve, let mystery fly out like a dove.

65

The Cheerfulness of the Nurses The way they raise their voices as they come in, as if they wish to reinforce the need for living. Tweakers of tubes, adjusters of clamps and pillows. They flip the urine bag, they draw blood. They say only enough to maintain for the day, one day at a time. There’s the Good Cindy and the Bad Cindy. One is clear, informative, exact, the other vague, unsure. Somewhere, the physician makes his rounds. Who wouldn’t like to believe he’s only a few floors away, coming this way, bringing a worldview, a philosophy?

Snow Falls, caked and heavy. Shadow, its acolyte.

The Brain Thinking of Return Maybe it struck the brain just now, the idea of return, a kiss of electricity. Maybe the brain took a blowzy leap before it chanced losing its nerve. Or, maybe from the first breath of anesthesia, the brain’s been plotting the landscape of return as strictly as a cartographer. Maybe the images the just-opened eye sees were first interior, moving outward, the difference between in and out not what we think, but easier, more porous. The eyes open, they become yours, gradually, barely, brownly, from the blank world back, tiredly taking on their work. What an effort it is to be, to carve a clean line through the rubble.

To Think of Latitude and Longitude at the Same Time To place oneself deliberately in the crosshairs. To set a special table for Thanksgiving, to wash up, to decorate the tree and take it down. To light even these few fires that call attention, in the dark. Holy Mary, snow queen, kite, flying with your flared bones over the entrance, I am having a revelation now. I imagine you making your choice. “How hard things are, already, how seasonal,” you complain

66

to the angel, but then you say, “Okay, sure, why not have everything? Why not here?”

And the Form of Things Is Fallen Onto the bed, aching, onto the wheelchair, the walker, the railings at the toilet, the sitting up wobbling against the therapist, the slow clothes on and off, as demarcations. Flight with its maddeningly invisible wings marries the lumbering form of things and agrees not to give up, never to give up on each other, agrees to go home, to live in the same house, to eat Kashi together while listening to the morning news, to complain bitterly about the government, to hope for better.

67

On a Marble Relief Sculpture of an Unknown Boy, 1865 Biggs Museum, Dover, Delaware X is at a slight profile, the muscles of his pointed little chin and lower lip pulled tight. If he had eyes instead of stone, they’d be clear, perspicacious, resolved to rid the world of whatever it needs ridding of. X is the kind who loves a zero hour, a great romance. You can understand why someone would want that in stone. It seems to say we can all make it through the war, the subway murders, the children lost down wells. X stands up even to the neutrinos pouring through everything with their ghostly mass. He remains plastered like a face transplant onto foreign bone, holding on beyond the loss of his name, his past. When I look at my grandson Josh who looks like me, I see how things are endlessly replaced, something lost, something gained: a shiver at the root, bell-strain inside the bell. Cold pushes into my eyes. I almost remember, I remember the noble thoughts, the way I looked into the future, buttoned up, as if there were a war out there. The big wars were just past, the ones coming on, private as my own skin. I looked like this boy. How permanent I was, how beautiful because of what I didn’t know.

68

Bridal Veil Falls Spread-legged, exposed, sun blasting in at ninety-three degrees, open door required to feel the fan across the hall, I’m half-dressed, half-asleep, in the 125-year-old room at Pinestead Lodge where once was weaving, once looms, once cows in the barn, once hay baled beneath the White Mountains, now only heat trapped beneath various shingle-rotted roofs, and me, residual, this century’s product: a sedimentary press of Freud, phonics, French, church camp, Claritin — a tabloid of rock and roll, Doonesbury, divorces. I get up and stretch my back like a bug on the rag-rug floor; I stretch the hamstring, the hips, one one-thousand, two one-thousand, spreading collapsed disks, pulling them away from each other, from the pushing-down past that wants to wallow in itself, trying to stop it with my set of vertical, overloaded bones. Now, hot, restless, I head down the shimmer-road like the Anglo-Saxon I am, baseball-hat helmet, tennis-shoe boots, the quick, the tick of the conquering mind, hypothalamus heightened, scouting a route out of the sun and into the trees, through fern beds, Indian Paintbrush, buttercups, and a frieze of unidentified star-white blooms, toward what? Toward the dark undercover, the melodramatic chasms, the downhill brook-singing. To head uphill against the downhill, to get an A in climbing, to see strict Mrs. Bridenstine still holding up my paper, the only A in the class. How exhaustive the mind is, inventing its absurd tests! A stone wall melts into the earth near Franconia, New Hampshire. That fact is stone. It can hold for years, slowly blurred with moss and ferns, finally blurred back to the earth 69

from whence it arose—granite, fire-rock, a pocket of magma trapped, cooled, risen, rounded, stacked, sinking with dizzying speed compared to the universe, which keeps its own slow mind turning, returning, obsessing, while I’m trying to extract some purpose, the trail steeper now toward Bridal Veil Falls. I meet a couple coming down, sweaty faces open, satisfied, having made it up and mostly down against (my take on it) the tide of Wal-Marts, McDonald’s, corporate mergers, the obese ease of America. Ahead of me, in New Hampshire, water rises from the ravine of its own making and falls, taking its gravity-ease, mindlessly clean, filtered and re-filtered through its own bed. Water. Fall.— the good round taste of words in my mouth, solemnized by graceful little silences. Actually, the words fall one by one into an old lake of silence that right away I recognize from when I used to grip the sides of the canoe in terror, sliding over the lake with logs just beneath the surface, seeing their sliminess and sinkingness that, at my age, felt like a dream of death, or of my parents crumpling each other, or their wrestling behind the door, hearing my mother, well— yet another unspeakable sadness I couldn’t stop, and all the rest that later compressed like sedimentary rock into my recurring dream of a buried body. Had I killed it? I thought so. At least I buried it, I was guilty of that. Rolled in a blanket under a dirt floor, it rotted slowly as I tried out for cheerleader and failed, tried out for marriage, succeeded and failed. Sometimes in the dream I’d reveal the location. There would be an uncovering,

70

which would wake me up. And then the slow uncovering of years, the therapists, the leaving, re-forming, awakening. It’s three o’clock, now. I’m awake, climbing, grateful my body has lasted this long, proud of it for doing so, of its muscular obedience. Of my whistling “Delta Dawn” accurately, birdlike, into the wilderness, What’s that flower you have on? Could it be a faded rose from days gone by? Which makes me think of “A Rose for Emily” by William Faulkner, that master of the dust-mote, of the winding down of families, of the last brave narrative voice in a wilderness of silence, the grand and punitive arrogance of thinking so, of dubbing any end the end. And there I go again, hooking everything on everything else, trying to get somewhere. And did I hear you say, he was meetin’ you here today, to take you to his mansion in the sky? She’s forty-nine, still waiting in the song, still trying to get out of Brownville, crazy with waiting or just plain crazy. The gnats are driving me crazy, spots in front of my eyes, staying with me as if my sweat were the last outpost of eau-de-vie, as if I were the mansion. In my Father’s house are many mansions, repeated my Sunday school teacher, each one festooned, cordoned off, a gem-facet of the great Truth made up somehow of Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Jews, that I would reach, I thought, I was not told, still I thought, still I kept on uphill to take the SATs, the GREs, read the Bible, work out, eat less cheese, learn to maintain my boundaries, which is why,

71

in the first decade of the twenty-first century, I, product of all that well-doing, am in love with Bridal Veil Falls, gnats notwithstanding, with the upswell of undercurrent, the well-marked Goal: the marriage of lightspray to the speechless dark. However, having not exactly planned this trip, having only two hours free, and no water bottle — and the next couple I meet says another hour up at least — I turn back, not without hesitation, not without a slow turning and turning again, a long look uphill, feet ready to go, but turning, the vibration of my longing gradually easing itself into a hum, a rhythm, an oddly comforting dissonance—I admit: an elation. A poison-ivy-edged, gnat-worried, leaf-swaled, rock-ribbed elation. I’m whistling. Something I love I won’t have today. It’s spilling out beyond me and tumbling down, and doesn’t know the word “love” from Adam. I’ve found a walking stick and three-leggedly thump the sharp decline, in the sixty-first year of my life, the narrative line disappearing into the earth, cool as snow-melt, absence leaving a certain awe behind, and joy as its sign.

72

The Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry Ronald Wallace, General Editor

Now We’re Getting Somewhere · David Clewell Henry Taylor, Judge, 1994 The Legend of Light · Bob Hicok Carolyn Kizer, Judge, 1995 Fragments in Us: Recent and Earlier Poems · Dennis Trudell Philip Levine, Judge, 1996 Don’t Explain · Betsy Sholl Rita Dove, Judge, 1997 Mrs. Dumpty · Chana Bloch Donald Hall, Judge, 1998 Liver · Charles Harper Webb Robert Bly, Judge, 1999 Ejo · Derick Burleson Alicia Ostriker, Judge, 2000 Borrowed Dress · Cathy Colman Mark Doty, Judge, 2001 Ripe · Roy Jacobstein Edward Hirsch, Judge, 2002 The Year We Studied Women · Bruce Snider Kelly Cherry, Judge, 2003 A Sail to Great Island · Alan Feldman Carl Dennis, Judge, 2004 Funny · Jennifer Michael Hecht Billy Collins, Judge, 2005 Reunion · Fleda Brown Linda Gregerson, Judge, 2007